Twenty-one former generals and high ranking national security officials have called on United States President George W. Bush to reverse course and embrace a new area of negotiation with Iran, Iraq, and North Korea. In a letter released Thursday, the group told reporters Bush's "hard line" policies have undermined national security and made America less safe.

Loren Thompson, a defense analyst with the Arlington, Va.-based Lexington Institute, said part of the reason that the military has called up so many people who were on reserve status is that certain skill sets such as military police or civil affairs were concentrated in the reserves after the Cold War ended. But he said the sheer numbers of IRR soldiers being mobilized also are a sign that the military doesn't have enough people to fight this war, now in its fourth year.

Lt. Gen. Craig R. McKinley, director of the Air National Guard, said there must be enough funding to keep reservists operating at the pace they have been or a draft could be possible. "What is the cost if we don't support our Guard and reserve?" McKinley said during discussions about funding for the units. "I believe it would be a debate over conscription."

Neo-Nazi and white supremacist hate groups are taking advantage of relaxed recruiting standards to infiltrate the US military to get combat training, a civil rights group reported. Standards have been relaxed because of wartime recruiting pressures, allowing large numbers of people with links to neo-Nazi and white supremacist groups to join the military. It cited neo-Nazi and white supremacist publications that encourage their followers to join the military to get combat training.

Pentagon officials announced Monday that the Army has managed to achieve its latest recruiting goals, while admitting that they have lowered some standards that had been set to ensure the quality of the force. But as the military continues investigations into alleged atrocities committed by U.S. troops in Iraq, some experts worry that the Army, stretched thin by wars in Iraq and Afghanistan and under pressure to fill its ranks, might be signing up soldiers who should not be in the service.

Frederick W. Kagan, a resident scholar at the Washington-based think tank, American Enterprise Institute, says in his new analysis that if the U.S. military is to avoid crisis in the future, the size of U.S. ground forces must increase by "at least 100,000 and possibly by as many as 200,000 active and reserve soldiers and marines -- combat and support forces both."

A military scholarship program that the Army surgeon general calls "our lifeblood, over time, for recruiting physicians" is failing to attract enough qualified applicants by wide margins. Difficulties in recruiting the next generation of Army and Navy physicians and dentists have spurred the Senate to approve new authorities to dramatically increase medical bonuses and stipends.

A diversion of money for the war in Iraq has helped create a $530 million shortfall for Army posts at home and abroad, leaving some of them unable to pay utility bills or even cut the grass, military officials say.

Assistant defence secretary under President Ronald Reagan, Lawrence Korb, said the Bush Administration is severely straining the military and faces a deadline."You've got about another year," he said. "If you don't cut back in Iraq, your all-volunteer army and Marine Corps will be in trouble."

The U.S. Army, aiming to make its recruiting goals amid the Iraq war, raised its maximum enlistment age by another two years on Wednesday, while the Army Reserve predicted it will miss its recruiting target for a second straight year.